Foamee: a barnacle app for indebted drinkers

Fellow North Shorer and superstah designer Dan Cederholm has released Foamee, a social web application that tracks who you owe beer to and who owes you a beer. Dan has a nice writeup on his motivation for building it.

Foamee is an interesting app, and not just because it involves drinking more. I find it fascinating because it is entirely reliant on the Twitter platform (at the moment, anyway). All messages in the Foamee system are Twitter messages.

For example, when you Twitter “@ioubeer @bokardo for allowing me to procrastinate by reading your blog” you are telling the Foamee system that you owe another Twitterer beer. Foamee keeps track of all of the IOUs so that at some point in the future you can make good on them.

In addition, all the information that Foamee knows about you comes from Twitter. Each Foameer? has what could be called a profile, but it is not editable and is made up entirely of information from Twitter: your handle and avatar as well as your IOU information that you’ve sent through Twitter. As Dan points out, this makes it nice and easy…no more profile information to add or import. Nothing to do! Nice.

When Dan was telling me about this app the word “barnacle” seemed to fit. So I think I’ll call this type of application a “barnacle app”. It attaches itself to Twitter and kind of filters through certain things it wants to keep. It can’t exist without Twitter, and in terms of getting up to speed that’s most definitely a benefit, not a liability.

Fellow North Shorer and superstah designer Dan Cederholm has released Foamee, a social web application that tracks who you owe beer to and who owes you a beer. Dan has a nice writeup on his motivation for building it.

Foamee is an interesting app, and not just because it involves drinking more. I find it fascinating because it is entirely reliant on the Twitter platform (at the moment, anyway). All messages in the Foamee system are Twitter messages.

For example, when you Twitter “@ioubeer @bokardo for allowing me to procrastinate by reading your blog” you are telling the Foamee system that you owe another Twitterer beer. Foamee keeps track of all of the IOUs so that at some point in the future you can make good on them.

In addition, all the information that Foamee knows about you comes from Twitter. Each Foameer? has what could be called a profile, but it is not editable and is made up entirely of information from Twitter: your handle and avatar as well as your IOU information that you’ve sent through Twitter. As Dan points out, this makes it nice and easy…no more profile information to add or import. Nothing to do! Nice.

When Dan was telling me about this app the word “barnacle” seemed to fit. So I think I’ll call this type of application a “barnacle app”. It attaches itself to Twitter and kind of filters through certain things it wants to keep. It can’t exist without Twitter, and in terms of getting up to speed that’s most definitely a benefit, not a liability.